The well at An Chorr Riabhach is dedicated to Saint Cuthbert, a name more commonly associated with the monasteries of Northumbria than with the drumlin country of east Galway, which gives this modest site an quietly anomalous quality from the outset. Visitors still leave small statues at the water's edge, continuing a practice of votive devotion that links the place to a very old tradition of seeking favour or healing at sanctified springs.

Holy wells in Ireland were typically regarded as sites of curative or spiritual power, often adopted into Christian practice from earlier devotional customs, and this one sits in a landscape that compounds its atmosphere. It lies in woodland on the southern side of a drumlin, the kind of low elongated hill shaped by glacial deposition, close to a stream and roughly fifty metres north of a burial ground. The well itself is roughly subcircular, defined by an arc of small boulders with traces of stone walling remaining on the western and northern sides where it is set into the slope. It has what appears to be a stone base, and its opening faces south. The construction is modest but deliberate, the walling reaching no more than about forty centimetres in height, enough to mark the site and give it a sense of enclosure without turning it into anything monumental.